The Next Great Thing

Dorothy Li, CTO, Convoy - Building Elastic Capacity in Freight (And Saving the Planet, Too)

November 29, 2022 Andrew Greenstein Season 2 Episode 11
Dorothy Li, CTO, Convoy - Building Elastic Capacity in Freight (And Saving the Planet, Too)
The Next Great Thing
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The Next Great Thing
Dorothy Li, CTO, Convoy - Building Elastic Capacity in Freight (And Saving the Planet, Too)
Nov 29, 2022 Season 2 Episode 11
Andrew Greenstein

Look around you. Chances are, most of what you see has, at some point, been shipped on a truck and driven around by a truck driver. Trucking is a massive, $800 billion industry in the U.S. — 80% of every dollar spent moving freight is spent on trucking. Despite its size and scale, America’s traditional freight network of brokers, shippers, and carriers is fragmented, inefficient, and antiquated. It’s also harming the planet. Nearly 35% of all trucks on the road are empty, and all those empty miles create 87M metric tons of carbon emissions a year. But trucking’s digital transformation, and zero waste mission, has begun. Dorothy Li is the Chief Technology Officer at Convoy, the nation’s leading digital freight network that uses AI, machine learning, and data analytics to optimize and automate a marketplace for matching a trucker to a shipper. Before Convoy, she spent 23 years at Amazon innovating everything from the initial launch of Amazon Prime, to Kindle, to AWS Cloud. Dorothy joins the podcast to explain how her team is creating more efficiency across — and visibility into — the freight network and expanding elastic capacity for shippers, just like cloud did for compute capacity. 

Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com.

Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein

Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.

Show Notes

Look around you. Chances are, most of what you see has, at some point, been shipped on a truck and driven around by a truck driver. Trucking is a massive, $800 billion industry in the U.S. — 80% of every dollar spent moving freight is spent on trucking. Despite its size and scale, America’s traditional freight network of brokers, shippers, and carriers is fragmented, inefficient, and antiquated. It’s also harming the planet. Nearly 35% of all trucks on the road are empty, and all those empty miles create 87M metric tons of carbon emissions a year. But trucking’s digital transformation, and zero waste mission, has begun. Dorothy Li is the Chief Technology Officer at Convoy, the nation’s leading digital freight network that uses AI, machine learning, and data analytics to optimize and automate a marketplace for matching a trucker to a shipper. Before Convoy, she spent 23 years at Amazon innovating everything from the initial launch of Amazon Prime, to Kindle, to AWS Cloud. Dorothy joins the podcast to explain how her team is creating more efficiency across — and visibility into — the freight network and expanding elastic capacity for shippers, just like cloud did for compute capacity. 

Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com.

Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein

Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.